The problem then with the virtual piles of photographs isn't really a sign of our failings as scrapbookers but rather, lamentably, as personal archivists. Counting on your kids to be able to scroll through your Facebook photo albums or your Tumblr? Think again. It's likely that if the photo sharing site you use goes under, your collections won't endure either.
"We're so new into this technology, and yet it's so widely adopted that we're just in this very unusual state where we've got all this kind of fabulous documentation, it's very fragile, it's very important, and we haven't yet figured out a kind of simple, easy way to make it endure," says archivist Bill LeFurgy. "It's a major problem."